Paper Theatres

A House of Paper – Cardboard Gothic

Pollock’s Toy Shop

Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill was the first private house to be built in the Gothic style, begun in 1747 it’s battlements were, bizarrely, made of papier mâché which had to be re-installed each time it rained. Leased from a Mrs. Chenevix who had a novelty shop in Charing Cross Walpole likened his house to ‘a jeu d’esprit, a toy from Mrs. Chenevix’s shop – a house of paper’. It seems Mrs. Chevevix sold paper theatres or houses but it was not until the early 19th century that model theatres made of paper and cardboard began to appear commercially. “Toy theatre” became a popular art form which replicated the dramas of the day in miniature, the theatres, tiny but complex structures available plain or painted like the real thing had proscenium doors and galleries on a wooden base with paper characters and scenery to be cut out and pasted onto cardboard.  The rendering of the scenery and actors is often beautifully done – a youthful William Blake and George Cruikshank, caricaturist and illustrator of Dickens both started as artworkers on toy theatres. Once drawn, the sheets were printed through a combination of etching, engraving and lithograph and sold by the sheet. Children bought them to use as toys, but adults also treasured them as souvenirs of their favourite actors and performances. As a child Robert Louis Stephenson had a passion for toy theatres – he loved the process of assembling and painting more than putting on miniature plays and couldn’t understand anyone buying a ready-painted one – he remembered the excitement of saving up and choosing his theatre. His 1884 essay pays tribute to the tiny grandeur of toy theatres entitled "Penny Plain, Twopence Coloured", he extolled the virtues of the paper dramas supplied by shops such as Pollock's. Other children's authors like Lewis Carroll and Hans Christian Andersen dabbled in toy theatre, as did Oscar Wilde. The brothers Jack and William Butler Yeats both used toy theatres as mock-ups for their work in art and stagecraft.

English Toy Theatre, 1850. Pollock's Museum. Image @Brittanica

In the first half of the 19th century, more than 300 of London's most popular plays became represented in toy theatres and these little paper theatres became rather elaborate with costumes, scenery and individual actors appearing: the orchestra came as a single strip to be pasted along the front of the stage.   The stage was about 6.5 inches wide and the tiny actors were sold on individual papers sheets, each sheet containing as many as four actors who might be different characters or simply the same actor in different theatrical poses, each character was to be cut out, pasted onto card and fastened onto wire slides which would allow them to slide on and off stage through grooves in the wooden base; tiny oil lamps provided authentic theatrical lighting.

Pollock’s Toy Museum